Advanced RPA: Developing an Individual Use Case for an RPA bot

Why is this important?

Having completed a structured automation exercise in the Pure Reformed Oils case, students are now encouraged to transition from guided workflows to independently designed automation solutions. This shift is motivated by the increasing demand for professionals who can identify, scope, and implement robotic process automations that improve business operations. Empowering students to explore use cases of their own choosing fosters deeper engagement and a practical understanding of RPA’s transformative potential.

What will we do?

This class initiates the process of individual automation development. Students will be introduced to the expectations of the upcoming Individual RPA Challenge, but no deliverable is required at the end of this session. Instead, the session focuses on helping students conceptualize a feasible use case, articulate the business problem it addresses, and begin prototyping the bot’s core logic. Emphasis is placed on demonstrating improvements in efficiency and effectiveness through RPA. Students are encouraged to draw from their own academic or professional contexts to ensure meaningful automation design.

Review and Extension:

Students will review key automation constructs such as variables, loops, and DataTables, which are foundational to most enterprise bots. These elements were introduced in the Pure Reformed Oils case and are now revisited in the context of enabling more flexible and scalable design. Through brief targeted exercises, students will reconnect with these concepts as tools for building more dynamic bots.

This class serves as a foundation for future work on the Individual RPA Challenge. As a class we will discuss human-in-the-loop concepts and some practicalities relating to different types of automation. While no formal submission is required in this class, students should emerge with a clearly defined use case, a set of initial requirements, and an early-stage workflow concept. In subsequent classes, students will refine these prototypes, integrate exception handling and reusable components, and evaluate their bots against metrics for efficiency and accuracy. This progression from concept to implementation mirrors real-world automation projects and sets the stage for critical evaluation and iteration.

Materials and Suggested Seating:

Case: Individual RPA Challenge Case
Case: Billing Bot (background) Case as an example of extending the bot to capture invoicing.
Case: Tax Form Bot (background) Case as an example of extending a bot from input data to interacting and saving pdfs forms.
Case: Distance Bot (background) Case as an example of extending a bot using input data to interacting with web browsers and obtaining data from websites.
Case: Sales Reporting Bot (background) Case as an example of extending a bot using sales data to interacting with dashboards to display sales information.
Case: Background reading (before or after class): Agentic AI vs Generative AI (by IBM) a good overview of the distinction between Generative AI and Agentic AI.
Slides: will be available for download by the beginning of class in either powerpoint or pdf formats.
Automation Tools: UIPath is recommended, but students are welcome to use any automation tool they are comfortable with or would like to try, such as power automate.

Suggested Pre-Class Preparation:

1. Students should be familiar with the Individual RPA Challenge Requirements.
2. Anticipate using PollEverywhere in the first half of class (see below) and to have a early conceptual plan for your individual RPA use-case that you can discuss with me.
3. If you have yet to visit the key tems part of the website, I recommend taking a quick look at it to feel comfortable with some of the terminology we will be working through in this class.

Class Plan:

1. After a brief review of RPA concepts, we will undertake an interactive discussion of human-in-the-loop (a.k.a. attended robots) versus fully automated robots (a.k.a. unattended robots).
2. We will then cover introductory material to build the foundation for agentic robotic frameworks, which will combine machine learning, generative AI and Agentic concepts together.
3. Finally, we will have workshop time for the development of the individual RPA solutions, during which I will check in with each individual.